


White Roses

by Pragnificent (PragmaticHominid)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Beauty and the Beast AU, Beauty and the Beast Elements, Fairy Tale Retellings, M/M, Where Will is the Beast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-09-21 13:37:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 7,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9551357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PragmaticHominid/pseuds/Pragnificent
Summary: The roses drew Hannibal to the castle.The soft light of the full moon fell on the tangles of white roses in such a way that they seemed nearly to glow, and Hannibal was so taken in by their beauty that he wandered far into the castle grounds, cutting the largest and brightest blooms from the bushes as he went, heedless of the thorns.He found himself drawn even more powerfully to the Beast, and though Will tried at first to drive him away, Hannibal was sure that they had much in common.(Now with Beast!Will and Hannibal art).





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art of Will and Hannibal found under Chapter Seven.

**I.**

The roses drew Hannibal to the castle.

The soft light of the full moon fell on the tangles of white roses which in such a way that they seemed nearly to glow, and Hannibal was so taken in by their beauty that he wandered far into the castle grounds, cutting the largest and brightest blooms from the bushes as he went, heedless of the thorns.

He was not one who was easily ambushed, but when the Beast burst out from the castle’s double doors and, roaring, charged at him on all fours, Hannibal’s surprise was genuine. The roses slid from his arms as Hannibal turned to meet him.

The Beast slid to a halt not a foot away from Hannibal and reared up on his back legs. Standing upright, the Beast was at least eight feet tall, and curling black horns added another foot and a half of height to him. Hannibal craned his head upwards as the Beast loomed over him, watching the white flash of massive teeth set in a heavy square-shaped muzzle as he raised his head towards the night sky and roared.

The Beast dropped suddenly into a crouch, setting his own shaggy face level with Hannibal’s, lips skinned back to bare tusk-like fangs. The growing came from low in the Beast’s heaving chest as he glared at him, but Hannibal thought that he could see a sort of terrified pain glimmering in his green eyes.

“Get out,” he said. The voice was hoarse from disuse but was otherwise entirely human, and hearing this Hannibal’s face broke into a pleased smile.  

He reached out to stroke the bristling brindle fur along the gaunt cheek, and the Beast jerked away from his touch as though he had been burned. He retreated backwards, heavy tail lashing against the ground.

The Beast came at him again an instant later, raising hands (which were not exactly hands but that were not precisely paws either) to slash at the air in front of Hannibal’s face. It was a feint, but one of the long black talons caught the bridge of Hannibal’s nose.

Hannibal held the Beast’s gaze as he ran his thumb over the thin line of blood, smearing it. He brought the pad of his thumb to his mouth and sucked.

The Beast was breathing more heavily now. The panic in his eyes had come close to the surface, but there was there too - desire, Hannibal was nearly certain, along with fear of the implications of that desire. His fur was brindled in black and tawny stripes, and over most of the Beast’s body it was short and stiff, but was longer across his shoulders and around the neck, a shaggy ruff that narrowed and grew shorter as it extended down his chest. It was matted, and Hannibal imagined running his fingers through it to untangle the knots and remove the dead fur until the Beast’s coat shined smartly.

The Beast tried one more time, lunging at him with a roar and snapping his teeth shut half an inch from the tip of his nose. Hannibal did not so much as flinch.

“Do you have any idea,” Hannibal wondered out loud, “just how beautiful you are?”

When the Beast only blinked at him with mystified confusion, Hannibal bent and began to pick up his dropped roses. Some of them had been trampled, but he judged that there were enough left undamaged to fill two large vases.

He cradled his bouquet in the crook of his arm, and looked back to the Beast. He could see that he was shuttering like a racehorse.

“Well,” he said, “will you invite me inside?”  


**II.**

The Beast could not give Hannibal his name. He had no name, or at least none that he could remember.

“Will,” Hannibal said, after a moment’s thought.

“Will,” the Beast repeated.

 

**III.**

Words come to Will slowly as he guides Hannibal through the castle, trying to explain what he understood of its curse.

“The castle is alive,” he told Hannibal, and Hannibal saw the truth of it; as he and Will walked the halls candelabra bent as though to peer at him suspiciously and doors opened and closed themselves to ease their passage.

The castle was bound to him and he to it, and he could not leave the grounds. Will’s strongest connection was to the roses. “Their pain is mine,” he said, staring down at Hannibal to see if he understood. “It’s inside my body.”

Hannibal pretended that he did. “An empathetic connection,” he said. “I won’t cut any more of the roses, Will. I hadn't realized. 

“But how did all of this come to be? Why is it is that you look the way you do?”

Will wet his lips, turned his head sharply away from Hannibal. “I did something that was wrong,” he said. “I was wicked.”

“I’ve been known to be wicked,” Hannibal said easily, “And yet, I’ve never found myself in a situation similar to your own. What did you do, Will, and who placed this enchantment on you?”

The story was disjointed, full of gaps. Important details that he had forgotten or else had never known were missing, and Hannibal suspected that there were also facets of the story that Will was deliberately leaving out.

“It wasn’t exactly what I did that was wicked,” he confessed, as they stopped to rest at the dining room table. “I killed someone to save the girl that he was trying to kill, but it was the… pleasure that I took in that killing that was wicked, or that was what the woods witch who cursed me said.”

“You don’t sound convinced of her argument,” Hannibal observed. He could see into the kitchen from where he sat, and the filthiness of the room and its obvious disuse distressed him. Dusty dinner plates and tarnished silver stood upright in the doorway, seemed to be watching them.

“I…” Will began.

“You did the best that you could do, given the circumstances?” Will’s shaggy head nodded once. “What business was it of hers how you may or may not have felt about it? The girl was safe. That ought to have made you a hero, not brought you under suspicion.”

“She wanted the girl to be under her own care - wanted to keep me away from her, I suppose, so she told everyone that I was dangerous.” He spread his hands helpless, the long claws clicking together. “She said… this way my outward form would reflect the ugliness that was inside of me, so everyone would know. Then I wouldn’t be able to fool anyone.” He hesitated, waiting - hoping - that Hannibal would say something.

It was easy to figure out what he needed to hear. “You have not in any respect fooled me, Will.” The relieved smile was a poor fit on Will’s protruding muzzle, but Hannibal found it endearing. He was sad to see it fade as he continued. “I think though that this witch may have fooled you.”

“The curse couldn’t have lasted this long if she wasn’t right,” he said.

“Nonsense,” Hannibal said lightly. “The enchantment has persisted because you believe in it, Will. You believe in it and you believe that you deserve it. Let go of that and you’ll see that your condition will become very different.”

Will was silent.     

Inside the kitchen, the table settings had seemed to have reached some sort of consensus. A space was cleared in the doorway, and a small tea cup rolled through it and towards the table. Hannibal wondered if it had come by its own volition or if the others had forced it.

He bent, laying the back of his hand flat against the floor. The tea cup brought itself to a wobbly stop a few feet from Hannibal’s hand, seemed somehow to be rallying its courage. Then it rolled itself onto Hannibal’s open hand.

“Careful with that one,” Will cautioned. “It’s got more nerve than common sense, and a poor sense of balance to boot.”

Hannibal brought the teacup to his eye-level, watched with wonder as it jittered nervously on his palm. There was a small crack along one side of it and part of its handle had at some point been broken off. “Enchanting,” Hannibal breathed.

**IV.**

Will dreamed of falling.

He woke with a jerk and a gasp as a bolt of pain crackled through him. The sun was streaming in through the tower window as he rose reluctantly from the tangle of blankets and skins that served him for a bed.

Will found Hannibal in the kitchen. He’d been cleaning, Will saw, but now he was simply staring down at something on the floor.

When he heard Will coming he looked up. “I’m so sorry, Will,” he said. “I don’t know how this happened.”

“Which one was it?”

“The charming little cracked teacup, I’m afraid. It wanted to be in my apron pocket - it rolled its way into my lap and into the pocket - and I thought that there was no harm in it as long as I was careful not to crush it. It must have wiggled its way out… I never realized until it was too late.”

Haven’t you got any glue? Maybe I can put it back together.”

“No,” Will said flatly. “It wouldn’t make any difference. Once they break like that the magic goes out of them. You’ve killed it.”

“Will, I don’t know what to say. I'm so sorry.”

It was strange, Will thought, looking down at the broken tea cup. Hannibal had spent so much of the evening before complimenting him, and though Will hadn’t wanted to believe what he felt to be completely groundless praise he had not for an instant questioned Hannibal’s sincerity.

Now though, when he wanted - _needed_ \- to believe that Hannibal was speaking the truth... he found himself doubting.  


	2. Chapter 2

Hannibal is a hunter, a trader, a physician, a man of letters. 

He goes out into the world and Will waits for him. He tries to wait patiently, to remind himself how much better it is to have someone to wait for, but that thought only sharpens his fear that the days of endless lonely waiting on nothing might at any time begin again. 

One evening Hannibal returned with a selection of sturdy combs and brushes, and after dinner he settled himself on floor near the fireplace, his legs sticking out in front of him, and beckoned Will over. “Lay down next to me here,” he instructed, and Will did, but nervously. 

It was hard for Will to believe that Hannibal really wanted to be near him, and though Hannibal had patted the stone directly next to himself Will curled up nearly two feet away from him. He looked to Hannibal, trying to see if he could get away with this much or if he ought to move further away, and felt the animal whine trying to escape his throat when Hannibal frowned. 

“No,” Hannibal said. “I can hardly reach you there. Come here, put your head here in my lap.”

So Will did, creeping slowly. He couldn’t quite dare to rest himself against Hannibal, fearful that the weight would discomfort him, but he held his head just above Hannibal’s knees and that seemed to satisfy him. 

“You must tell me if I hurt you,” Hannibal said, and Will felt his hands begin to ply gently at the tangled ruff of fur that grew around his neck and shoulders. 

Those hands were a wonderment to Will, who for so long had only had his own heavy paws to work with. It was impossible for him to remember for sure, but Will had an idea that even among normal humans Hannibal’s hands would be considered something special - strong and steady, but so graceful. 

Hannibal had used those hands to build a fire, that first night he came to the castle, and Will had watched him as he did, trying not to let on how desperately starved he was for the heat and light that flame brought with it. Will’s hands were not dexterous enough to use a flint and steel. The memory of coming out of one of the long periods of nearly catatonic malaise that had defined his life in the castle prior to Hannibal’s arrival and finding that he’d allowed his last long-guarded ember to grow cold still invoked him an agonized sense of mourning. 

He hadn’t allowed that first fire that Hannibal had built to go dead, but had tended it with a nearly obsessive dedication. And Hannibal had returned from his wanderings one day with a box of matches, which he had shown Will how to use, though he’d broken a dozen before the first one sparked to life. 

“Every time you leave I’m terrified that you won’t come back,” Will confessed now, watching the fire as it flickered its way onto a new log and began to consume it.  

The sensation of Hannibal’s fingers working through his ruff did not stall. “There will be no getting rid of me,” he promised, and Will shifted his head slightly so he could watch Hannibal’s face. “I couldn’t do without you, Will - not for very long. You are so warm and so soft,” he said, and reached for one of the combs, “and you are going to be even more stunning when we have gotten you completely brushed out.” 

Will reached up to scratch behind his ear, embarrassed, and quick as a blink Hannibal had sat the comb back on the floor and caught Will’s hand by its thick, blunt fingers. He pressed the rough pad of Will’s palm against his cheek. “I’m going to draw your hands, Will, though I am not sure that I could ever really do them justice. The artful curve of your claws, the way they taper to such fine sharp points. How they gleam in the firelight. And there’s such power in your hands. Oh Will - the way I can see the tendons and muscles working under taunt skin when you flex your hands, so economical and so perfectly suited to the task for which they were made.”

_ Everything that is monstrous or twisted about me is golden in Hannibal’s eyes, _ Will thought, and rebelled against the idea even as he longed toward it. 

“They’re weapons,” Will said. “I can barely even touch anyone else without hurting them.”

Will hadn’t wanted to say that, exactly. He had wanted to say,  _ I can’t even touch you - not the way that I would like to - without hurting you _ , but he hadn’t quite dared. He let his head sink down onto Hannibal’s knees, though. That seemed alright, because Hannibal had told him he could and since he had been deliberately touching Will for some time now. 

Hannibal seemed to understand what he'd meant, though - seemed to counter the words that Will hadn’t spoken. “No one will ever do me harm while you are nearby.”

“Never,” Will promised in a hoarse whisper, and for perhaps the first time he found himself enjoying the feel of the viciously sharp teeth in his mouth. 

Will’s hand was still against Hannibal’s cheek, though instead of holding it there Hannibal was now gently stroking the fur on the back of his wrist. Swallowing hard, Will twitched one finger carefully, running the claw back and forth through Hannibal’s hair. Hannibal closed his eyes and leaned into the touch, humming contentedly. 

“I can see you, Will, blazing through the snow to come to my aid, setting upon a pack of wolves that meant to attack me and tearing them to ribbons. I can hear the bones break, Will, I can smell the blood. Can you?”

And though in his past life as a man Will had never taken pleasure in the killing of wolves, even when it was necessary to protect livestock and the people, he felt a thrill enter him at the picture that Hannibal was painting, or perhaps because of the way Hannibal was stroking his forearm, his fingers trailing all the way down to his elbow and then ruffling the fur against the grain as they traveled up to his wrist again. 

Something strange happened then. A rumbling began inside of Will, emanating from some unspecifiable location and his body began shutter in waves that were somewhat akin to trembling but infinitely more pleasurable. 

“My god,” Hannibal breathed, his voice full of wonder. “You  _ purr _ . Why didn’t you tell me?”  

Will was at least as astonished. “I had no idea that I could!” he said, and the vibrations in his throat made his voice sound strange. 

“My poor Will,” Hannibal said, running his fingers in slow loops up and down the long length of Will’s arm. “Alone here for so long, no one to stroke him like this, no one to help him to discover how wonderful he really is.” 

“I think that I love you,” Will said, and as soon as he spoke the words he became terrified at having actually said them. The purr died abruptly. It was, he thought, a repulsive thing for him to have said, he was a monster, barely human. Hannibal had been kind to him, but -

And Hannibal lifted Will’s head up from his lap, cupping his jaw between both his hands, and placed a kiss on Will’s forehead. 

“Thank you for finally saying that,” Hannibal said. “I think that I have loved you from the very instant that I saw you, but I didn’t think that it would be good for you - I didn’t think that you would believe me - if I said so first.” 

“What, when I was trying to chase you away?” Will said, incredulous. There was a small part of his mind that was alarmed - even repulsed - by this admission, as it was whenever Hannibal waxed poetic about Will's potential for violence and destruction, but it was a very small part of himself, and in that moment utterly unimportant.   

Hannibal only smiled.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While I was writing this I took a moment to research when matches were actually invented/became commonly available, and surprisingly this wasn't until about the late 1830s. 
> 
> I felt no need to have a set time period in which this story took place, but I suppose I like the idea that Will was cursed some time before matches were first created and met Hannibal after they'd become common place. 
> 
> PS, I want to thank everyone for the lovely comments. They're really encouraging.


	3. Chapter 3

“You may be tempted to believe that it is hunger that seasoned this meal,” Hannibal told him, the first time he took over the neglected kitchen, “and that your enjoyment is derived simply from the fact that you have gone so long without a proper hot meal. This would be a gross underestimation of my talents.”

Though Will was certain that, after fairing for so long almost entirely on raw fish and other aquatic creature that could be snatched from the creek that ran through the castle grounds and the products of a dozen unhealthy apple trees, anything else would taste like a dream, Will hadn’t doubted what Hannibal said. Still, the never ending series of wonders that Hannibal worked in the kitchen continued to astonish him.

Hannibal baked fresh bread, and the first time that Will felt the crispy crust give way under his teeth to the fluffy warm interior he wept. Hannibal made pastries, soups, souffles, roasts, a dozen things that Will had forgotten existed and scores of others that he was certain that he’d never heard of before. He brought things back from his trips into the villages - staples, yes, but also rare spices and chocolates and wines, and on one magical occasion an orange.

He brought home game, too. Wild boar, he would say, and Will puzzled over that because he had a vague recollection of having had pork before, and while the taste was similar he did not believe that it was exactly the same.

But…

“Venison,” Hannibal told him now. “A leggy little doe that tried to outrun me and instead blundered right into one of my snares.”

But Will knew unequivocally that what was sitting on his plate was not venison.

He had on occasion brought down one of the deer that wandered onto the castle grounds to raid his orchard, so he knew very well what venison ought to smell and taste like. He tried to tell himself that it was a question of preparation - certainly, Hannibal’s astounding abilities in the kitchen would produce something very different from those occasional gory feasts. Will had done what he could to hide from Hannibal how degraded his life had been - how beastial - prior to Hannibal’s arrival. And Hannibal had shown discretion, most of the time, but he felt that if he broached the topic of the meat on his plate now it would invite discussion of the gnawed bones lying in the rubbish pit.   

So he ate, and it was fantastic, but he wondered why Hannibal was lying.

Will watched, too, to see if in the lie Hannibal looked the same way that he did when he spoke lovely to him. He did not, and Will allowed that to be enough to reassure himself that Hannibal had not lied, after all, about anything that really mattered.

**II.**

“I’d like to go out hunting with you sometime,” Will said, some weeks later. They were walking the outer boundaries of the castle grounds, and Will couldn’t help looking wistfully out at the dense forest that grew on the other side of the castle’s crumbling outer wall.

He would have liked to do almost _anything_ away from the castle with Hannibal. Truth be known, a hunt was fairly low on his list. But fantasizing about such an outing only required him to ignore the fact that the roses bound him within the castle grounds, rather than considering the complete impossibility of going any place where one might find human beings, looking as he did. And besides that, it was the type of thing that Hannibal liked to hear.  

“Explain to me the terms of your curse,” Hannibal said.

“I’ve told you everything I know.”

“But what does the spell demand for it to be broken? There is always some way. True love’s kiss, perhaps?”

Will dropped his eyes shyly. “That would make things easy, wouldn’t it?”

Hannibal’s lips twitched in a brief smile before returning to his topic. “Others demand blood - freely given or else taken by force. Very powerful curses may require all three elements.”

“Blood and the kiss?

“Both types of blood, yes.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Tell me more about the roses.”

“I’ve told you,” he said again. “I can’t go past the last of the roses, and they only grow on this side of the walls. It does me harm if the roses are deliberately damaged.”

“That’s to keep you from interfering with them. That will be the key, I should think - the strength of the enchantment is in the roses but its weakness will be there too, somehow.”

Hannibal stopped in front of one the bushes and glared up at it resentfully. It was taller than Will and covered in an unnaturally prolific riot of white blossoms.

“At first I thought that they were so lovely, but now I despise them,” Hannibal said. “The scent is cloying. I’d like to tear them out by their roots.”

“I think that would kill me,” Will said. He was touched, though, to see Hannibal so angry on his behalf.

It made him feel cared for.

 

**III.**

There were times now that Will nearly forgot about the way he looked. He would lift his hands and feel a dysphoric shock when he saw the great padded paws and their long claws.

One day that uneasy feeling of not being himself within himself became so unbearable that he went looking for a mirror. A reminder, he thought, to quell the confusion that he’d been feeling. He would look at himself and he would try to be kind to himself as he looked.

He’d broken almost every mirror in the castle within hours of having been transformed, had flung the shards out as far into the woods as he could. There was a hand mirror, though, in Hannibal’s dresser. Will knew that he used it for shaving.

Letting himself into the room, Will tried to steady his breathing and control his panic. _It doesn’t matter_ , he told himself. _Remember what Hannibal said about you. He likes to look at you - you should get used to looking at yourself._

But when Will snatched the mirror up and looked down into it he did not see his own heavy furred face that he saw looking back at him. It was Hannibal in the mirror.

He was there for only half a second, then the image began to ripple, and something black and made of sharp angles moved within the rippling, but Will could not make out what it was.

The image solidified again, and for just a heartbeat he saw someone else, someone who he had forgotten, pale and scarred and with wild brown curls.

Then it was gone, and he was only the Beast again, and he smashed the mirror against the wall and howled out his agony until Hannibal came, and stroked his fur, and whispered to him until he was still.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has gone on longer than I had planned, but the next chapter will be the last, and I hope to make it a good one.

**I.**

The villagers descended upon them early one evening, seemingly from out of nowhere. They surrounded the castle, nearly two dozen of them at least, and Will and Hannibal watched the flickering of their torches from the tower. 

There was a hunger in Will to see other faces, even stoney with poorly suppressed terror and twisted by outrage as these were, and he started down avidly, his sharp eyes picking out minute details in the growing dusk, even as his insides twisted in fear at the sight of the dull metal scythes and the clubs that the villagers had brought with them. 

“Why are they here?” Will said. He was asking,  _ Why have they come for me after so many years, when it had seemed that they didn’t even know that I existed? How did they find me?  _ And he was asking,  _ Hannibal, did you make a mistake? Were you followed… Did you say something to someone? _

Hannibal choose to interpret the question which Will had voiced literally. “Do you see the tall man at the fore, the one built like a bull, with the fine shining sword on his hip?” Will stared for a long moment, then he nodded. “That’s Jack Giant Killer. He is a slayer of monsters.”

“You should leave, Hannibal - run, before it’s too late.”

“No,” Hannibal said, almost absently. And then: “Jack’s the dangerous one. The others are only peasants and shopkeepers. They’ll scatter if you frighten them.” 

They watched in silence as the mob drew closer. Will felt Hannibal fold his smaller hand overtop his own paw. 

When he and his people had reached the courtyard, Jack came forward. “Hand over the monster,” he shouted. His voice was very loud. It reverberated with a sort of tightly controlled fury. 

“You’re making a mistake, Jack,” Hannibal called down from the open window, and it seemed to Will that there was something terrible about how flippant his voice sounded. “It’s your men who will pay for it. I'm curious if they know that.” 

Will saw Jack mouth Hannibal’s name, his face settling into hard lines of determination at the taste of it. And he saw several of the men exchange uneasy looks with one another. 

Strangely, when Jack spoke again he did not seem to respond directly to Hannibal. “Give us the cannibal and we’ll go,” and the words felt like spit on Will’s cheek. What stories had they told about him, these strangers that he’d never seen before and who had never seen him? Anger welled inside him. 

“I don’t know how they found out, Will,” Hannibal said, “but they won’t have either of us.”

And there was no time to think about that, because then they started to burn the roses.

**II.**

Will lost all sense of who he was. 

He had been thinking, as he watched the mob draw closer, that he would do anything that he needed to do to keep the invaders out and to keep himself and Hannibal safe, and he had been preparing himself for whatever violence that would require. 

But they had set fire to the roses and the fire was inside of him and he could think of nothing but stopping the pain. Even Hannibal was forgotten as he rushed down the tower stairs. Will was on top of the first of the interlopers as he crossed the threshold,  and the man’s torch spun out of his hand and slid across the floor. It came to a stop beneath one of the overstuffed arm chairs. Finding itself alight, the chair attempted to flee the flames that were creeping up its upholstery, and instead spread the fire further into the castle as other animated inanimate objects began to burn. 

Will’s agony had already been absolute but it grew somehow as the fire spread. The blood was roaring in his ears as he tore into another of the invaders and the man’s blood was in his mouth, coating his teeth and his tongue and he knew now, in a distant way that he could not consciously understand while his mind was so totally given over to the Beast but that he would not forget, just what it was that Hannibal had been feeding him. 

He lost himself, for a time. 

He was lost in the blood and the pain and the screams and the heat of the fire, and when he came back to himself the courtyard and gardens were littered with corpses and the last of the invaders were fleeing into the woods. His face was bleeding, and he had a vague memory of feeling the dagger enter his cheek and slice upwards before grating against bone, of pulling the blade from his flesh in the same gesture with which he wrenched off the arm of the man who welded it.

Will stood, panting, among the bodies and the burned roses while smoke still roiled from the castle’s open doors, and realized that he had not seen Hannibal since this had all began. 

He lifted his nose in the air and tried to catch Hannibal’s scent over all of the blood and death and smoke. 

It came to him, and then he was running.  


	5. Chapter 5

Will bounded up the spiral stairs on all fours.

His own breath was harsh in his ears and very loud, but over it he could hear Jack and Will fighting, the clang of steel on steel and the heavy breathing. There was a clattering sound as Will rounded the last curve, the noise of a heavy blade hitting the floor and skittering towards stairs, and Will shied to the side to avoid cutting himself on it and saw that it was Hannibal’s.

He entered the tower room and saw them. They were both bloody and breathless, and one of Jack’s ears had nearly been torn from his head, but it was Hannibal who’d been bested. The wall was to Hannibal’s back and the tip of Jack’s sword was at his throat and he held his hands up at the same level as the blade, showing that they were empty, and Will saw that this made no difference to Jack, who had only paused because he had something that he wanted to say to Hannibal before he killed him.

The growl began low in Will’s chest, and Will himself felt the menace in it, how different it was from the preformative threat display he had used so many months ago to mask his own terror as he tried to frighten away a stranger who had inadvertently caused him to hurt. The threat was real now and it was inside of him, the way the pain of the roses had been, and as he stalked closer to Jack the growl grew and grew.

Jack’s blade did not waiver, but he turned his head to look down at Will, creeping towards him on all fours, his teeth bared. And when Will saw the way that Jack looked at him, he understood.

The context of everything that had happened here tonight - what, exactly, it was had brought these men to his home - was in this sense immaterial, because it had no bearing on the essential truth. The truth was that he was a monster, and that, no matter what happened next, the castle would never be safe for him again now that the men knew that a monster dwelled here. He knew also, as he had always known, that no matter where else he might go now he would be welcomed only with spears and fire and sharp knives.

“Will,” Hannibal said, and when their eyes met Will thought that he could happily drown himself in the love and admiration that he saw in Hannibal’s eyes. There was still so much that Will did not understand, but the rest of his life was decided in that instant.

Will had decided.

Jack shifted his body so he could watch them both at once. The tip of his blade had not moved from the hollow of Hannibal’s throat.

Will stood upright. “Let him go,” he said. “You came for me.” He said this though he no longer believed it, because it was something to say to buy time, and watching Hannibal from the corner of his eye he saw that Hannibal understood.  

“I came for the cannibal,” Jack said. “But whatever kind of monster you are, we’ll put you down too.”

“‘We,’” Hannibal mocked, and the scorn in his voice shimmered like a razor blade. “Go and look out the window, Jack. All those fresh faced farm boys who followed you out here to rid the world of monsters are growing cold, having bled out in the dirt.”

Jack pressed the tip of his sword against Hannibal’s throat, drawing a bloom of blood and a quick, nearly inaudible intake of breath.

“If you hurt him, I will tear your throat out with my own teeth,” Will said. Jack’s eyes turned back towards him, not frightened but believing. He watched intently to see if Will would try rushing him, and in that single instant in which Jack was watching Will and not Hannibal, Hannibal drew a dagger and plunged it into Jack’s stomach.

Jack did not go down. Only his blade slipped, sliding from Hannibal’s throat to the center of his chest. That was where it entered, a second later, as Jack braced himself with all of his remaining strength and drove the sword into Hannibal.

Will was on top of Jack a second later, knocking him on his back, and he did just as he had promised. He lost himself again, then, but not for as long as he had last time. Hannibal’s voice brought him back.

“Will?” he heard, as faint as a sigh, and he turned from worrying the body and padded on all fours to Hannibal’s side. The sword stuck up from his chest, terrible to look at. “Will,” Hannibal said again when he saw Will looking down at him, and smiled.

Hannibal’s eyes were becoming glassy already, and Will could see himself reflected in them perfectly. He was smeared with filth and gore. There were scraps of meat and cloth stuck between his teeth, and he realized that he must have swallowed something of the men which he had savaged, but this understanding came to him without any great feeling of shock or disgust. His teeth were painted red with blood and blood dripped steadily from the gash in his cheek.

“Remarkable creature,” Hannibal whispered, reaching up towards him. Will lowered his head to meet his touch, and when Hannibal’s hand began to falter, the strength going out of it, Will cradled it in his own palm and lifted it so that Hannibal’s hand rested against Will’s cheek, as it had on that first day. Hannibal’s fingers moved unsteadily, stroking his face.

There was blood bubbling at the edges of Hannibal’s mouth but Will kissed him anyway, needing to show his love and needing for Hannibal to understand the sincerity of that love before he was gone, thinking too with a foggy sort of distant desperation that it might somehow hold Hannibal here if he refused to acknowledge that he was dying.

Instead, he felt Hannibal’s final breath flowing into himself. His fingers tightened spasmodically in Will’s fur and then went limp.

Hannibal was gone.

Will lifted his head, already knowing that Hannibal was gone, but the looking was hard and he felt tears begin to come, rolling down his face and falling on Hannibal. They were tinged pink with blood, those tears, and blood still dripped from Will’s torn face.

He howled, squeezed his eyes shut so he would not have to see the blood on Hannibal’s still face, and clinging with clawed hands to the front of Hannibal’s shirt he drew the body into his lap, cradling it.

There was then some sort of blurring of reality, and with it came a beam of light so bright that it burned Will’s eyes from behind their lids. Only dumb instinct kept him from opening his eyes to that blinding light.

The feeling of unreality came again - the sense that the world had somehow been warped around him - briefly, and when it departed it took the light with it, and now the thing that Will held in his arms was much bigger than Hannibal had ever been been. It was all hardness and sharp angles, and it unfolded itself from Will’s embrace as he blinked his eyes open and looked up to see the creature regarding him from a great height with its gleaming black eyes.

Everything about it was black, though only the eyes shined. It was thin as a skeleton but nearly twice the height of any mortal man, and he knew somehow that those spindly emaciated limbs were powerful enough to tear even Will to pieces. Its head was crowned with antlers, the same matte black as the rest of him.

“Will,” it said.

And Will wet his lips and said, “Hannibal?”

“The roses are gone now - dead. Can you feel it?” Will nodded slowly, realizing consciously the truth of this only now. It was like having a noose taken from around his throat. “You can leave whenever you choose. Shall we go abroad like this, monsters that we are, and slay and slaughter and spread such terror that legends will be told of us for a thousand years?”

  
Will was frightened by the creature. “No. Please, I want Hannibal back,” he said, though he knew that it was Hannibal that he was looking at. “I don’t - come back, please.”

Will could see the shimmer of disappointment in its black eyes. “I had hoped that you would be ready to love me as I am, Will, as I have loved you,” it said, and the ache in its voice cut at Will. He wanted to say something, wanted to take back the hurt that he had caused it, but the fear was still strong, and it blocked his throat.

“Close your eyes again, then,” it said, sighing.

Will did. He heard the creature move closer to him, the creaking of dry joints as it lowered itself down to his level. Cold radiated off of it. Will squeezed his eyes shut even more tightly as he sensed it lean in toward him.

He felt the creature’s lips on his own, cold and stiff and full of death and worse things - a yawning cavernous hunger that knew no satiation, no matter how desperately it longed to be filled.

But it _was_ Hannibal.

It was Hannibal, and Will held himself still and allowed it to kiss him, and when the light came again - brighter and hotter than before and burning as though from inside his own body - Will leaned into the monster’s touch and kissed it back, wrapping his arms around its skeletal frame and clinging to Hannibal with every bit of his fearsome strength.  

There was an instant, when Will opened his eyes again, that he thought that he had been blinded by the light after all.

Hannibal was somehow gone from his arms and the tower room was so dark that Will could not see where he had went. All of his senses felt dulled and distant. He was cold, he realized suddenly, cold in a bone-deep way that he could barely remember ever having been, and when he wrapped his arms around himself he felt the fragile, naked human skin beneath his small smooth palms.

There was the sound of a match being struck in the dark, muted, and then he could see Hannibal in the flame’s wavering light as he lit an oil lamp and came closer. It was was Hannibal, alive and as he had been before. There was a mirror in his other hand and a fond smile on his face.

Hannibal lifted the lamp up to take best advantage of its light. He held the mirror out to Will waiting for him to take it, and Will saw that it was the same one that he had shattered, somehow made whole again. Every broken thing seemed now to be coming back together, and Will took the mirror and held it up to his face.

The wounded, blood-streaked man who looked back at him seemed at first a stranger, but Will stared long and hard and at last found himself in the nervous flick of the tongue to wet dry lips and in the smile that bloomed after a quick glance up at Hannibal. In the eyes, especially, Will recognized himself.  

He watched those eyes grow troubled as the questions began to crowd in on him, and he handed the mirror back to Hannibal. Hannibal sat it on a nearby table, next to the lantern.

“I don’t understand what’s happened,” he said.

“Blood, freely given,” Hannibal told him. “Blood, taken by force. True love’s kiss. Those are the terms of the curse, Will. That’s what I need to change - what you gave me, twice now.”

“Which one is the real you?”

“You are asking if I am a monster who was cursed to be a man or a man from whom the talent to become a monster was stolen?”

Will nodded. His head felt so strange - so light - and his neck seemed precariously thin and fragile. “Yes.”

“Does the answer matter to you?”

Will found that he wasn't sure. He changed tracks. “Could you change me back, if you wanted to?”

“Easily,” Hannibal said. He bent over Jack’s body and rolled it onto its belly with an easy strength that Will did not believe he’d possessed before. “I met your witch, Will - oh, decades ago. I’m surprised that you don’t remember her more clearly, she made quite an impression on me. A personality as brazen as her red hair.” He paused, working from behind on the buttons that held Jack’s fur cloak around the bloody ruin of his neck.

Hannibal stood, the cloak in hand. “I ate her heart, of course.”

  
“Of course,” Will repeated, and could not read the tangle of emotion that choked his voice. Was it disgust or wonderment?

“Put this on,” Hannibal said, stepping towards Will and holding the furs out to him. “You’re shivering.”

Will took it from him, though the furs were tacky with blood and tattered in places. He put his fingers through the holes that he had torn his own claws, and felt somehow terribly lost.

Hannibal watched him wrap it around himself. It was odd to Will, seeing that Hannibal still watched him with the same admiration that he had when Will had been a fierce-looking Beast, though now Will felt feeble and defenseless inside of his own body. 

“It would be a harder task for me to change again,” Hannibal continued. “You would have to be willing to bleed for it. You would need to kill. And you would have to love me. Do you still love me, Will?”

“You made all this happen.”

“I steered a few pieces into position. I hoped to rid you of the damned roses. A powerful piece of work, and not put in place by the witch who transformed you. The apprentice, I suppose.

“You did the rest. You saved me.”

“Should I have?”

There was the same sharp, almost silent, intake of breath that had come when Jack pierced the skin on Hannibal’s throat. His ears still felt dulled, but Will thought that it would have been impossible for him not to catch that small secret admission of pain. 

“Will?”

Will let the silence grow. He watched as the tip of Hannibal’s tongue flicked out and wet his lips. Tried to think about that, instead of the bodies lying in his orchard.

Will knew that he had already made up his mind, but waited to see if Hannibal would break first.  

When Hannibal finally spoke his words came quickly, almost in a rush. “Stay with me, Will. The world has gotten so much bigger since you last saw it. Let me show you.”

 _This is what Hannibal looks like when he is really frighten_ , Will thought, watching closely so he would remember. There were so few things that seemed to frighten Hannibal, it seemed a wonder to Will that losing him could be one of them.

Will felt a smile tugging at the edge of his mouth. He couldn’t help it. “Lots to do and see, when they can’t tell that you’re a monster just by looking.”

“Yes, Will,” Hannibal said. “There is.”

“I think,” Will began slowly, “that I can remember seeing the ocean - or else wanting to. We ought to go and see the ocean, you and I.”


	6. Coda

There was nothing that Will needed to pack.

The fire had burned everything, and rather than crawling back into the castle to search for some remnant of his former life, Will sat on a stone and waited while Hannibal took from the dead a relatively clean set of clothing and shoes that almost fit Will’s feet. 

There was, after all, one rose left, and they both spotted it at the same time. A green bud on a thin sprig of vine, growing right against the back gate. 

Will stepped forward, still awkward in the dead man’s shoes, and crushed it underfoot. 

The pain was unimaginable, as though every ounce of agony that had come from the burning roses had been concentrated into that one bud and the single instant in which Will killed it. That pain caught it his throat, too large to fit inside of a scream, and Will’s legs buckled. 

But Hannibal was behind him. He caught Will as he began to fall. 

Hannibal held him up until he was ready to stand under his own power again, and then he simply held Will and allowed Will to hold him until the tears stopped. 

Eventually, Will pulled away. He laughed shakily when he saw that Hannibal’s face was wet, too. 

Then they walked on, side by side, and the castle was soon behind them. 


	7. Chapter 7

No new story content, but art of Will and Hannibal by the wonderful [Camilleflyingrotten](http://camilleflyingrotten.tumblr.com/)!

 


	8. Chapter 8

I realized that I never posted the colored version. 


End file.
